The Night Café
Get Away from the Feeling EP
Create/Control
As strange as it may seem, given neither truly feel all that far away, a lot of gen-Y music fans will recall the British garage rock revival with the same fondness and nostalgia that gen-Xers will recall the wave of Britpop. Although not intertwined with tabloid rivalries and nearly as much chart domination, there’s still an unquestionable impact that artists like Arctic Monkeys, Bloc Party and even The Libertines had on the teens of that era. They’ve since become twentysomethings, taken up their own instruments and started bands that are inherently indebted to this moment in modern music history. Liverpool four-piece The Night Café are one such band – and, to update a key memetic phrase, only 2000s kids will get this.
That’s not to say that the sole artistic merit of Get Away from the Feeling, their debut EP, lies entirely within having read NME cover to cover while wearing a one-inch Kaiser Chiefs badge and a vertically-striped scarf. The point is that it helps in a big way. Anyone who was intimately familiar with the sound will immediately note the signposts – the intrinsic harmonies, the reverb-heavy and watery lead guitar tone and the urgency of the drum patterns. The four songs on offer are tightly-wound, radio-ready and inherently accessible – and while that could be considered a downfall for many also-ran artists, The Night Café use it to their strength. They know exactly what they’re doing, and within the context of the sound that they’re going for it’s among the best of a current batch of bands pursuing the exact same thing.
Time might be a flat circle, but as long as it’s spinning you may as well get into the groove. Get Away from the Feeling is a brief but bright burst of guitar pop that carries time-honoured tradition with aplomb.
– David James Young